Quick Take
A UC Santa Cruz student was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident at Bay Drive and Meder Street on Jan. 30. His high school friend and fellow UCSC student Aidan Smith has struggled to cope with the crash and has come to see it as more than just a tragic accident. The risks at Bay and Meder were already known, he writes. He believes the intersection is dangerous and urges the city to change the traffic pattern by adding a stop sign or something to slow drivers down and permit easier crossing before another life is changed forever.
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If there were a stop sign at the intersection of Bay Drive and Meder Street, I could call my friend Nate on the phone right now and he would pick up. He always picked up.
On Jan. 30, Nate, 20, was leaving the UC Santa Cruz campus, heading southbound on his motorcycle on Bay Drive, when a driver taking a left from Meder Street hit him.
He has been my friend since high school. He supported me when I broke my collarbone in a cycling accident. We both knew the risks and respected each other’s love for life on two wheels.
When I saw the accident on my way to campus that morning, I didn’t know it was him. I just saw almost a dozen emergency workers surrounding a body on the ground, and a lot of police. I spent the rest of the day wondering who was hurt. I assumed someone had died.
When I heard it was Nate, my stomach dropped. I gasped for air. I will never pass that intersection again without thinking about him. I pass that intersection every day.
A stop sign, a traffic light, something to direct traffic so drivers in both directions know when to stop and when it’s safe to go would have saved him.
As I write this, he is still in the hospital in critical condition, and even weeks after the accident, it is too soon to visit. His family is overwhelmed with the extent of his injuries.
Stunned by grief and unsure what to do when I learned about his condition, I walked to the Bay and Meder intersection, just five minutes from my house. I looked at the signs, the lanes of traffic buzzing up and down, the two-lane road on each side and a swarm of pedestrians crossing the massive crosswalk like a treacherous river with a rickety bridge.
I paused and spotted a photo behind a sign, and a note. It was a photo of another student and a message from a loved one, mourning a tragedy that happened at the same intersection three years ago. That crash was fatal.
Not 5 meters from where Nate was hit, another UCSC student, Kyle Neil, died in April 2022 after hitting a traffic sign at the intersection.
As I read the sign, I looked out to see a spray-painted police body outline of where my friend landed after his crash. The outline was 5 meters from the sign.
It was macabre.
It’s not just the drivers, it’s the road.
The intersection is unsafe. In fact, it is one of the 10 most unsafe intersections in the county, according to a report compiled by personal injury law firm Jacoby & Meyers using a point system to rank levels of danger. That listing came out before Nate got hit.
How many more points in the “danger score” before the city acts to make the road safer?
Right now, crossing the four-lane road means taking a risk. The flashing yellow lights warn drivers to stop, but not everyone does. The lights are hard to spot in daylight. I often see drivers blast right through them. That means pedestrians take a risk every time we believe cars will see the lights and stop. It’s a high-traffic crosswalk, with a bus stop on one side. Crossing should not be a gamble.
Drivers traveling southbound, down the steep hill, also have to be wary of those turning blindly out of Meder Street.
Yes, drivers need to be careful. But it is not good public policy or planning to expect drivers to guess when they make a turn into oncoming traffic.
People make mistakes. At night, the roads are dark. Many students are unfamiliar with driving, biking or riding in a new community. The roads and traffic patterns should account for this – especially in a spot that has proved deadly and where a large proportion of teen and young adult drivers, bikers and pedestrians frequent.
Proper infrastructure saves lives. We need infrastructure at Bay and Meder that slows traffic and gets the attention of drivers. We have to remove the ambiguity and make stopping at that intersection mandatory.
That might mean a stop sign. Or a traffic light. Or maybe the city could put in a HAWK, high-intensity activated crosswalk. Its sophisticated appearance and signals to let pedestrians know when it’s safe could discourage drivers from flying down Bay Drive.
Two of the most serious accidents at this intersection have involved motorcycles and young drivers. Yes, motorcycles are dangerous, but so is this road. It is the city’ s responsibility to make it as safe as possible.
My friend’s life and that of his family will forever be changed by this terrible accident. The City of Santa Cruz should show us it takes his life and the lives of all community members more seriously by fixing this problem before more families and students end up hospitalized and suffering.
I felt helpless when I found out about Nate. But now, I hope that if he wakes up, I’ll be able to tell him I did something. I said something about the accident and about the dangers of the intersection that changed his life.
Aidan Smith is a UC Santa Cruz student in the graduating class of 2026. He intends to pursue a career in child development and education while pursuing his love for painting, poetry and cycling. He grew up in Claremont, California, where he and Nate both graduated high school one year apart. He wrote this piece as part of Community Voices opinion editor and UCSC professor Jody K. Biehl’s opinion writing class.